*Why Republicans Can’t Debate Obama* Posted By *Daniel Greenfield* On April 22, 2015
[image: Description: obama-vs-gop] <http://www.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/obama-vs-gop.jpg>[1]The Republican Party is a party that does not know what it stands for. It has a voter base, but no identity, and it is facing an ideological war while lacking an ideology to guide its counterattack. Democrats and Republicans both form progressive parties. The GOP doesn’t publicly embrace this identity, instead paying lip service to small government and individualism, but Democrats have been hitting most of the same notes ever since the backlash from the New Deal and the Great Society went critical. Even Obama says many of the same things when he needs to. Internally both parties embrace the progressive essentials of a large centralized government that coordinates with major corporations and non-profits to manage society, making the expert supreme over the individual, the university over the village and the study over common sense in an endless cycle of reform, not of government, but of social institutions and human behavior. The difference is that the Democrats are a progressive party with a left-wing ideology and Republicans are a progressive party without the left-wing ideology. The political difference is significant, but the policy difference is insignificant because the mechanisms of progressive governance, the unionized bureaucrat, who defines what government does, and the expert adviser, whose studies and committees define what government should be doing, are mostly of the left, especially when the policies in question relate to social issues. Progressive governance is built around the university. Its form of government embeds the prejudices and hobbyhorses of academia into the realm of policy. The tilt of universities toward the left has made progressive governance a vehicle for implementing left-wing ideology. The Democratic and Republican parties are both in denial about the implications of this reality. The Republicans just happen to be more in denial about it because while there are few demographic differences between party leaders, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren all used to be Republicans, there are major cultural differences between the bases of both parties. The Democrats merged the elements of their old urban political machines with the big reform agendas of the activists who fought against them. Their party reconciles the big city political machines and muckrakers in one big Socialist tent with corruption and totalitarianism for all. The Republican base unites social conservatives, national defense hawks, a post-immigrant urban and suburban middle class and rural farmers, into an opposition to the pace of change, the loss of their way of life and the power of government to interfere with their lives. But they are wedded to a progressive party that disagrees with their reasons for allying with it. The Republican Party has failed to stop Obama because it is unable to articulate what he has done wrong besides violating the processes and procedures of government. Its establishment is unable to convincingly debate him because they agree with his premises while challenging his processes. Amnesty is a typical example. A Republican leadership that supports amnesty has denounced Obama’s amnesty not for its impact on Americans, but for its procedural illegality. And Obama taunted them with the populist argument that he was doing what they were too gridlocked to do. By arguing process, Republicans become locked in to a defensive argument about their authority while Obama postures as a populist cutting through the red tape and “getting things done”. Americans agree on process, but are unenthusiastic about it. Process doesn’t impact their lives. Policy does. And Republicans can’t argue against policies that they substantively agree with. Republicans were unable to convincingly win the argument on everything from government bailouts to Benghazi because they agreed with too many of the policy premises that led to them. Instead of discussing the roots of the financial crisis or the roots of the Libyan War, Republicans tried to pounce on end stage corruption and dishonesty. That might have been an effective tactic in a different media environment, but it’s hard to blow up a scandal when the media is your enemy and you can’t credibly differentiate yourself on the underlying issues. Genuine populism requires root cause critiques. You can’t simply pounce on local misbehavior, like the lies about Benghazi, while letting the real problem, supporting Islamic terrorists, fall by the wayside. Populism doesn’t limit itself to a situational scandal. It challenges the entire system. To challenge Obama and Hillary, Republicans have to stop clinging to the same progressive premises. They have to be willing to take on the ideology and the policy, not just the bad outcomes. Otherwise they’re no different than the Democrats who supported the Iraq War, only to turn on it for political advantage. Republican politicians drip fed talking points by experts are unable to mount big picture arguments. After talking to some of the right experts and industry lobbyists, they can call for reform, but they don’t understand the issue in any depth outside their talking points. Their proposals progressively restructure government without dealing with the real problem. That’s why you will hear them rattle off the same clunkers about pinning a green card to every immigrant with a degree or how we need to talk more about fighting radical Islam. What they can’t do is discuss whether there actually is a shortage of American workers with degrees or what the actual difference between radical Islam and Islam might be because these are areas where they largely agree with the premises of their supposed opponents. It’s hard to argue with a position whose premise you agree with. Once you accept the premise, then the differences become cosmetic. They become ways of signaling cultural differences, such as a free market orientation or muscular rhetoric, without offering anything useful to voters, or addressing the underlying problems with the policies that the other side is pursuing. Republican politicians excel at signaling opposition without producing it, exhausting the patience of their base and the opposition. Unable to argue policy, they instead debate process, allowing Obama to take the lead and do what many of them want done anyway. If the Republican Party is to deserve victory, it will have to differ from the Democratic Party in more than the character of its stale rhetoric. It will have to become a populist party that challenges the progressive policy machine and rejects its displacement of individual rights, a party that stands for the democracy of the individual, not the oligarchy of the social collective. We already have a progressive populist party. If the Republican Party wants to be a populist party, rather than a grudging opposition of the sensible big business progressives, its populism must reject the progressive state. That will mean dramatically overturning a century’s worth of bad solutions, standing up to central government and tearing out the bureaucracy by the root. The Republican Party will have to stop standing for systems and start standing for people again. *Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: **Click here* <http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=david+horowitz&rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&qid=1316459840&rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&sort=daterank> [2]*. * *LIKE* <https://www.facebook.com/frontpagemag?fref=ts> [3]* Frontpagemag.com on Facebook and **Subscribe* <http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&id=c761755bdf> [4]* to **Jamie Glazov Productions* <http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&id=c761755bdf> [4]*.* ------------------------------ Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: *http://www.frontpagemag.com <http://www.frontpagemag.com>* URL to article: *http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/why-republicans-cant-debate-obama/ <http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/why-republicans-cant-debate-obama/>* URLs in this post: [1] Image: *http://www.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/obama-vs-gop.jpg <http://www.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/obama-vs-gop.jpg>* [2] *Click here*: *http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=david+horowitz&rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&qid=1316459840&rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&sort=daterank <http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=david+horowitz&rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&qid=1316459840&rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&sort=daterank>* [3] *LIKE*: *https://www.facebook.com/frontpagemag?fref=ts <https://www.facebook.com/frontpagemag?fref=ts>* [4] *Subscribe*: *http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&id=c761755bdf <http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&id=c761755bdf>* ------------------------------ [image: Avast logo] <http://www.avast.com/> This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. www.avast.com __._,_.___ ------------------------------ Posted by: "Beowulf" <[email protected]> ------------------------------ Visit Your Group <https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/grendelreport/info;_ylc=X3oDMTJmbW9tajUwBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzIwMTk0ODA2BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTMyMzY2NwRzZWMDdnRsBHNsawN2Z2hwBHN0aW1lAzE0Mjk3Mjc0Mzc-> [image: Yahoo! 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